Putting myself out there

There is a comfort in working for someone else. The power goes out, and I just take care of what I know I need to, and call the Powers That Be. The Powers That Be handle the bills, the payroll, the order that didn't get placed and we need right now, screaming children, screaming adults. You know, all the fun stuff. But it also means that I am, basically, anonymous. The work I do is rightfully attributed to the place where I work. Unless someone recognizes me (it took the guy who runs the farmer's market, a regular customer, two years to make the connection) or I volunteer the information then I could be anybody or nobody. Now, I am not the kind of person to take advantage of that and slack off. This industry is way too small and I have too much respect for myself and those who I work with to not want to produce consistently great stuff. If I do make an error I am more critical of myself and my work than even my bosses, even if the customers don't know the mistake was mine.

Still, sometimes I want the whole package. I want to be known for the work I do, to have that work recognized as mine. But that whole package is scary, and fraught with, well, other people. Other people are a chaos factor, an unknown variable. One of the things I love about pastry is the organization of it all, the ritualized predictability. If you cook sugar to this temperature, it is soft ball stage, this temperature is hard crack. People don't work that way. Joy, sorrow, allergy attacks, euphoria. Completely unpredictable.

And yet, if I want people to know my work (which I do) I have to get it out there to people. So I'm trying. Here and there, I've been offering things up. Gentle, timid sacrifices to the mob.

We'll see where it takes me.

A quick Shout Out

My sweet friend SisterDiane (Diane Gilleland) does a podcast and blog about all things crafty, particularly if it involves building community through social networking, supporting independent crafting or the joys of plastic canvas. She is not a cook, which makes her a nice conversational change of pace in my world, but she does appreciate cooking as a craft.

She decided she wanted to do a podcast on cooking and interviewed me about things like finding inspiration for cooking after doing it all day and how to avoid burnout; I'll probably explore some of those ideas here more later, because they are interesting topics. For now, though, I'm just going to mention this and go back to finishing the next video post.

Coming soon, upsidedown cake!

New

Auto-complete is a funny thing. You start typing a title and get a little jolt from the past. I typed with word "new" in this title and my computer wanted it to be "New Beginnings, Same old mistakes."

What the hell is that??

I have no idea when I said that. It wasn't, in fact, here ( I checked). It is also, for me, ridiculously pessimistic and negative. Change may not be my favorite thing to cope with, but it has to happen. Make it the best possible, try and get something new from it. Or at least, that is how I think I think I am. Stuff like auto-complete tends to bash my head about a little.

So I got a new job. We're moving away from our life with this step. I am, in fact, scared. Not as to whether or not I can do the job - I am confident that I can. I am scared about my judgment. And that is a devastating thing to be scared about. I have been told many times that my judgment is flawed. It was always in the context of doing exactly what someone else told me to do, rather than following my own instincts, so you would think that would make me want to stick to my guns more. Apparently not. And it gets tangled up with authority figures and roles of responsibility. Basically, it makes the people who said I have crappy judgment correct. Screw that.

This is a different kind of job for me. Not in terms of work, but in terms of structure, culture. Attitude. I can learn all the things I was hoping to learn from my last position and more I would never be able to learn here. New things. New Beginnings. Maybe some new mistakes, sure, but new mistakes are a lot more interesting than the same old ones. And if I do make old mistakes, well, maybe they will look different in the new place, and I can learn to stop making them.

All the wonderfulness of an apricot, just with a new skin.

Thousands of chefs can't be wrong, right?

My sister has ideas that often have merit. Case in point, the brown butter panna cotta was her suggestion, and while I still think it will make a killer flan and I need to tweak the actual process for this just slightly, the original idea was worth investigating. Many of her ideas of late have been focused around manager roles in a creative workplace in a digital/modern/changing world. I've been thinking about her ideas and if they would work in a kitchen. They are very mentor-driven ideas, full of facilitation and communication. How credit and praise get assigned. Less regimentation, more fluidity.

I'm not sure how many of them could work, and I'm not sure how much of that is me having bought into "the way things are done" in most professional kitchens.

Here it is, in plain English. I don't like the way my boss does things. I think some of his work is good, more of his work is outdated and the rest is at best half-assed. His style of mentoring doesn't teach us much of anything because most of the time his answers are the "because that's how its done" type. More than once I've asked about why something works the way it does and gotten an "I don't know". And then there are those other issues so common in an industry like this one. I'm not delving into those. But as I'm being screamed at for some trivial detail about how to plastic wrap a sheet pan that was perfectly legitimate yesterday there is a little part of me that says, "Ah, yes, this must be a real kitchen, he must be a good chef, because that's what they do." I sat in a meeting once in which we were told to suck up the abuse because one day we would be in charge and would abuse people because that is how things get done. Lots of kitchens follow this axiom.

I'm not sure it really has to be that way. Does it? What parts of the system do we keep, what parts to get rid of?

Escoffier is credited with the brigade system in most kitchens, specialized roles that define who does what where and when. And now there are kitchens where every cook learns every place, where they rotate out to the front of house and act as servers, even. But, as a specialized cook who would have a really hard time boning out a chicken, I kinda like that brigade. There is a tradition of cooking less and less as you move further up the scale, and I really don't like that one. I'd rather stay low, for now, and get my fingernails dirty. As for the screaming, the psychological damage, well, this industry is a pressure cooker and something has to weed out the bad veg. So what replaces that so that when you really need it, when it is your 23rd day in a row and tomorrow you feed a four course plated dinner to 600, you turn around and you have a staff there ready to go?

How do you get the passionate ones? And if you get them, is this how you keep them? Where is the line between practical, inspirational necessity and just stupid egotistical habit? I'm not sure what the answer is to that. I am scared of what such an answer would say about me and where I am right now. See, I've stayed with someone who may be on the wrong side of that line. Probably when I shouldn't have. Has that ruined me for the good kitchens? Will I even be able to recognize them or am I going to look for the wrong signs?

Rather than spend my weekend thinking about it, I'll just cook.

Absolutely appropriate

I noticed yesterday in the bathroom that I have a zit on my nose.

Let me back up. The first restaurant I ever worked in had a sous chef named Rob. Actually come to think of it, I have worked at three places that had sous chefs named Rob. Weird. Anyway, as it was my first restaurant job, I was green as grass. As a career changer I was old enough to actually know this. The sous chef, Rob, kinda scared the bejeesus out of me.

It wasn't anything that he said or did in particular. It was just that he was always there. I felt like everything that he asked me was a test. Some tests were easy, to me; when he offered to let me leave at the end of my first shift without needing to clean up, I said I'd stay. They didn't offer me the chance to stay on until after I mopped. Like I said, that one was an easy test. He'd also ask questions about methods and plans and what exactly I was doing and those were trickier.

At the end of every shift he came around and thanked everyone on the line including me.

But it got easier for me. I kept up a bit more, I contributed. I always stayed to clean. Towards the end of my tenure (I was working for free on the weekends while I was in school, so we all knew when I was leaving.) he came around at the end of the night to say thanks after he had changed into street clothes. We had worked the last nine hours together, he had pushed, I kept up, and still stood in awe of his position.

I noticed as he thanked me a rather spectaular zit on his nose. Nine hours, I hadn't noticed it. I noticed the smooth actions on the line, the being everywhere he needed to be, the good questions, the good food. It was a fascinating thing, that zit. Humanizing, yes, but I knew that if it was there the next week, I still wouldn't see it until he was in street clothes.

So when I went to the bathroom yesterday after they promoted me, the face that looked back in the mirror seemed to reflect history accurately.

Time to go to work...